The book that is being most heavily promoted on late-night and other liberal television in advance of the Republican National Convention is "Bushworld: Enter At Your Own Risk" by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Ms. Dowd's tangy, viperous analysis cuts a fairly broad swath in its targets, but in recent years has zeroed in on what she considers to be the misdemeanors of the cast of characters who form the Bush administration. Bushworld is populated, for example, by the Boy Emperor (President Bush), Rummy (Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld), Wolfie (Deputy Secretary of Donald Defense Paul Wolfowitz) and Uncle Dick of the Underworld (Vice President Dick Cheney).

It sounds juvenile, but she zings them. The Post-Gazette runs her column once or twice a week, so she must be brilliant.

One would expect Ms. Dowd's first book in her 30 years as a journalist to be more of the same, delighting her fans and annoying her enemies. Mr. Bush has nicknamed her "The Cobra." The problem is that this isn't much of a book.

It has an original although undistinguished opening 19-page introduction and two pages of acknowledgements, that include her sister and her niece, but the other 504 pages consist of reprints of Dowd columns, dating from 1992 to 2004.

Some of these are definitely fun -- or, let's say, fun to read again -- but basically Ms. Dowd is running a game on her most devoted fans, those who have read her column faithfully over the years. And the publisher, G.P. Putnam's Sons, is asking $25.95 a pop for the tome. Maybe that's Ms. Dowd having a go at reality comedy, or trying to see just how dumb we are.

It's nice to have a compendium of Ms. Dowd's columns, but we expected more.